Toll Road Cameras Fail to Nab Cheaters

Some 2.5 million cars sped through Orange County toll plazas in the last year without paying and were never tracked down because of faulty video surveillance or missing license plates, costing the toll road agency at least $3.6 million in lost revenue.

A review of toll road agency documents obtained through state public information laws shows that, in the last year, roughly half the drivers who used toll roads without paying could not be identified, even though video cameras are set up to capture images of such offenders.

People cheat the system by driving past automated toll booths without paying, or by using lanes reserved for motorists who have prepaid their toll and whose cars are equipped with transponders that are read by overhead equipment.

Transportation Corridor Agencies officials grudgingly concede that due to their inability to trace the drivers through license plate numbers, millions in toll revenues was lost.

Had toll officials been able to track down the drivers and extract the typical fines for avoiding a toll, the agency stood to collect more than $142 million--a figure that rivals its annual budget of $199 million. Fines range from $20 to $96 for each violation.

In the past, the contractor handling toll collections reimbursed the agency for uncollected tolls--but not the much larger fines.

Although agency officials laud the fact that video cameras are used to monitor and identify nonpaying customers along the county’s 51 miles of toll roads, they are reluctant to admit that the cameras are often foiled. The agency documents, obtained through the California Public Records Act, suggest that during some months, more than half of the video images were useless.

Instead of clear video images of license plates, toll officials are often left with shots of pavement, blurry pictures of plates, photos of bumpers and--sometimes--no video image at all. Older, dark-colored California license plates are particularly difficult to read, and temporary paper plates are virtually impossible to track through the Department of Motor Vehicles. In other instances, crafty toll cheaters evade the cameras by straddling median lanes or by covering their plates. Motorcyclists in particular have been known to place a hand over their rear plates while passing through automated plazas or booths.

Toll officials are reluctant to discuss the problem for fear of encouraging motorists to cheat. But they say cheating and botched video images make up a small percentage of overall toll transactions.

The benefit of having unstaffed, automated toll lanes, which keep traffic flowing briskly, outweighs the money lost because violators can’t be tacked down, toll officials said.

“Every industry has to deal with people who are trying to take advantage of the system,” said Lisa Telles, a tollway spokeswoman. “Unfortunately, that’s human nature.”

In the last year, more than 80 million motorists traveled the Eastern, Foothill or San Joaquin Hills toll roads. Based on that usage, the rate of untraceable cheaters is 3%. Telles said the fines from cheaters who are caught makes up for any shortfall.

Still, toll officials are scrambling for improved ways of snaring offenders. “All violations bother us,” said Colleen Clark, the chief financial officer for the toll agency. “We don’t want to lose money. We also have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that tolls are paid.”

Until recently, the agency’s primary contractor, Lockheed Martin IMS, reimbursed the agency for poor-quality video images. Payments for the poor images averaged $200,000 a month or $2.4 million a year, said Mike Leahy, director of toll operations. But now that Lockheed and the TCA have parted ways over a contract dispute, toll officials can no longer rely on those reimbursements to help offset the revenue lost to cheaters who escape detection.

Among other steps, officials have installed additional video cameras to record images of vehicles driving between lanes. The agency has also contracted with the California Highway Patrol to hunt down repeat violators based on the make of their car and the hour at which they are known to blow through a toll plaza.

“There are things we can do,” Leahy said. “Say there’s someone who has had paper plates on their car for six months and refuses to use real plates. If we keep getting photographs of a red Mustang, we can tell the CHP when and where they usually pass the toll and they can keep an eye out for them.”

With TCA violations reaching 5% a month and climbing--compared to a national average of 2%--the TCA’s finance chief has called for a new get-tough policy on violators.

But even if toll officials adopt a policy to fine violators $25 for their first offense, it would have no impact on those who cheat and who cannot be identified.

The problem of unusable images is not a common one to tollways in other areas of the country, particularly the East Coast, but only because they are just now installing such cameras. Though the Orange County toll roads were designed with automated toll lanes in mind--the radio transponders affixed to a customers windshield--toll authorities in Massachusetts and New Jersey, for example, only now have opened such lanes.

Bob Bliss, of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, said the toll road there has a 4% rate of violations, but the agency hopes to cut that in half by installing video cameras.

“In the meantime,” Bliss said, “we just use a lot of state police.”

Not Caught on Camera

Documents show that about 2.5 million motorists who sped through county toll booths without paying will never be caught because of faulty video surveillance and missing license plates, which means the toll agencies have missed out on more than $3.6 million in revenue. How the system is supposed to work:

1) Overhead antenna reads transponder as car goes underneath

2) Road sensor counts number of axles

3) Cameras take photos of violators’ license plates

Source: Transportation Corridor Agencies